


don't nod and dream

by Snickfic



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Captain Marvel (2019), Recovery, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:06:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22609759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: “You kidnapped me,” Yon-Rogg said. He couldn’t quite keep it from being a question.(Or, four times Carol was there when Yon-Rogg fell asleep, and one time she was there when he woke up.)
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Yon-Rogg
Comments: 18
Kudos: 130
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	don't nod and dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



“You kidnapped me,” Yon-Rogg said. He couldn’t quite keep it from being a question. His hands shook when he lifted them, and his skin was oversensitized to the point of pain, which was the natural consequence of being exposed to the Supreme Intelligence for so long. His eyeballs ached. He closed them.

“I was in the area,” Vers—Carol said. She’d been insistent on that name when he’d mumbled the other before, still half-drowning from a surfeit of the supreme presence.

The craft they were in stuttered in the air, jostling Yon-Rogg against the poorly-padded seat. He gasped through the shock of it with his eyes still closed, uninterested in seeing Vers—in seeing _Carol_ see this weakness in him. When things smoothed and he could trust his voice again, he said, “A very fortunate coincidence.” 

He meant it skeptically. Said out loud, it sounded more like gratitude. Vers didn’t answer, at any rate, and Yon-Rogg soon turned his efforts towards not being airsick. He hadn’t lost his stomach while flying since he was sixteen, and he wasn’t about to break that record now. He breathed in and out, in and out: short, shallow breaths. The next thing he noticed was the squeeze of a hand on his shoulder.

Vers was crouched in front of him, peering into his face more soberly than she’d done almost anything while still under his command. “Can you sleep?” she asked.

Yon-Rogg laughed and was immediately sorry. When he’d finished heaving strings of bile onto the grimy, pock-marked floor—where _had_ Vers picked up this scrap heap?—he muttered, “I imagine natural sleep will be beyond me for some time.”

“Good thing I’m not much for organic,” Vers said. The next moment Yon-Rogg felt the sharp prick of a hypo at his neck. His last waking thought was: Why did Vers even _have_ a spacecraft?

* * *

It was a Skrull who treated Yon-Rogg. Of course it was. “This is Soren,” Carol said, as though it were an explanation. The Skrull seemed to know her way around the medbay of what was clearly a Kree vessel. Eventually it dawned on Yon-Rogg that this must have been the same Kree vessel he fought Carol on, months ago. Yon-Rogg tried not to flinch when the Skrull touched him, when her green face peered too close to his. Casually, as if it made no difference to her, she said, “I can look like someone else if you’d like.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Yon-Rogg said. He didn’t think he’d managed to keep the alarm out of his voice; when he saw Carol’s eyebrow rise, he was sure he hadn’t. But the Skrull only hummed and continued scanning him.

“A dark room,” she pronounced at last. “Bland food. No screens. _No_ excitement.”

“So it’s like a concussion,” Carol said, her gaze sliding over to Yon-Rogg and away again. She was concerned, he thought. How odd.

The Skrull shrugged. “His mind is exhausted by the overstimulation. He needs fluids and rest and quiet.”

“We can do that,” Carol said, without so much as consulting Yon-Rogg—but then, he was no longer in a position in which he should expect to be consulted. He ought to be thinking of how to escape, but the thought exhausted him. That was treachery of a kind, surely. Did it count as kidnapping when the victim was so relieved to be captured? 

Carol saw the Skrull to the door of the medbay, where they turned out the lights one by one, until there was only the walls’ ambiant glow to see by. “You heard the lady,” Carol said, when she saw Yon-Rogg still sitting up. “Rest and quiet.”

“Are you going to stay here, then?”

“Can’t let the Skrulls sneak in and assassinate you, right?” Carol said, but not as though she was actually concerned about it. Then, finally, he understood why she’d hovered all through his examination—not to protect him from the Skrull, but to protect the Skrull from him. 

“What’s going to happen next?” he asked. So she’d captured him, but she very reasonably didn’t trust him—he’d have had Minn-Erva shoot her out of the sky the last time they met, if she could have managed it. Perhaps she’d drop him off at some border planet somewhere, or something beyond Imperial space entirely. Leave him on Contraxia, let him make his own way as he would.

“You’re going to sleep, is what’s going to happen.” Carol put a hand to his shoulder, and Yon-Rogg let her press him down onto the bed, his head to the pillow.

“Am I?” But he already knew the answer. He was fading fast, now. He wondered if the restorative fluids the Skrull had insisted he drink had had some kind of sedative in them.

“Yep,” she said cheerfully.

“Do you sleep, these days?” he asked. 

“Sometimes,” she said. It was the last thing he remembered.

* * *

Carol did not drop him off on Contraxia, although she did give him the option, more or less. It was a sleepless night for Yon-Rogg. Without medical assistance, he still found sleep difficult. Sometimes he meditated; this time he made his way to the bridge. Carol found him there shortly after, no doubt alerted by his Skrull surveillance detail. “So,” she said, without preamble, “What do you think I should do with you?”

Yon-Rogg laughed shortly. “Put me back where you found me,” he said. “I can promise you I’ll do you no harm there, nor any of your Skrull friends.”

“I’m not doing that,” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “I can take you somewhere if you want. If it’s off our route, we can take the Porsche.” It was her name for the rattletrap she’d captured him in. She’d never explained the origin of the word—or the origin of the craft, for that matter. “Or you could stay.”

“What, here?” They had the bridge to themselves for the moment, except for a Skrull child over in the corner, playing some kind of hybrid between a puzzle and a dexterity exercise, and another child watching it. “And do what?”

She shrugged. “Help?”

“This is your crusade, not mine.” Even if there was something about the way the Skrull children looked at him sometimes, a mix of horror and awe, that made him want to put them through some simple drills—nothing difficult, just something to occupy their minds, teach them some discipline, show them they had nothing to fear from him.

Except they did, of course. All the more reason for him to be somewhere else.

“I thought after what the Supreme Intelligence did to you, maybe you’d see things my way.”

“Is that why you sent me back?” Yon-Rogg asked, half to save himself from answering the implied question and half out of curiosity. He wouldn’t have guessed she had that degree of cunning in her. (That degree of _cruelty_ —but no, returning him to the Supreme Intelligence couldn’t ever be cruel.)

“ _No_ ,” Carol said. “I didn’t—you were her favorite. I knew you were. I thought—” It took Yon-Rogg a moment to realize who _she_ must be. To Carol, the Supreme Intelligence was a woman, because that’s how the Supreme Intelligence had appeared to her a couple of times. 

Carol had turned away to look out the window. After a while of looking at her back, straight and unyielding, Yon-Rogg circled around the console to see what had her attention. It was only when he got a look at her face, at the unhappy twist of her mouth, that he realized she wasn’t looking at the stars at all. “I didn’t think she would torture you.”

“It wasn’t—” Yon-Rogg cut himself off. _It was correction_ , he meant to say, but he thought he knew what Carol would say to that. “You’re letting your emotions impede your judgment,” he said. “I’m a threat to you and to—to your allies.”

“Are you?” Carol asked soberly, looking him in the eye.

He looked away first. “It would be better for you if I weren’t on board.”

“Because you’re planning to hurt me?” Carol asked steadily.

He’d promised the Supreme Intelligence to kill her, once. It wasn’t a promise he could have made again. “No.”

“Or them?” Carol glanced behind him to the Skrull children exclaiming over their game.

“No,” he gritted out. No, he’d been compromised, and he knew it because the thought of pointing a blaster in their direction made him ill. This was what he’d become. “No,” he said, defeated.

“So stay,” she said. “Help us. Just until you think of some place you’d rather be.” She said it so simply. 

“All right,” he said at last. “Just until then.”

She flashed him a brilliant smile. It pushed his reservations to the back of his mind for a little bit longer. “So what were you doing up here anyway?” she asked. “Just enjoying the view?”

“Not sleeping,” he said wryly. He was staying. He was staying to _help Skrulls_. No, he was helping Carol. It was more palatable when he put it like that. 

“There’s tabs for that, you know.” She said this like it was a joke. 

He struggled to imagine what the joke was; finally he gave up. “The sedatives they have on board this ship are well past expiration. They make me groggy.”

“Well, I can put you to sleep the old-fashioned way,” Carol said, that smile still on her lips. 

Yon-Rogg blinked at her. Surely—

“With a really boring book,” Carol said cheerfully. 

Ah. That did make a great deal more sense than the image that had come to mind.

“Come on, there’s a whole library on the computer—Earth stuff _and_ Kree stuff. We’ll knock you out in no time.”

They ended up in one of the lounges, suddenly mysteriously clear of Skrulls. Carol had the ship’s AI begin to read something aloud—a work of Earth fiction, which normally Yon-Rogg might have tried to pay attention to, but he hadn’t slept in two days, and the AI’s voice was very soothing. Carol sprawled on the floor nearby with her hands on her stomach, eyeing the ceiling as if there were secrets in it. Even when Yon-Rogg leaned back and closed his eyes, he felt her presence there, steady and bright and tinged with blue: absurdly powerful. A comfort.

* * *

Carol didn’t always offer him reading materials. Sometimes she offered him a fight. “It always helped me,” she said.

“Not with sleeping,” Yon-Rogg pointed out.

“I mean, eventually it did. I just had to wear myself out, you know? You get tired enough, the stuff you can’t remember kind of—gets quiet.” Carol inspected her fingernails. There was a complicated twist to her mouth.

The things Yon-Rogg couldn’t quite remember, buried under an endless wash of sounds and sights and smells and touches bleeding together into a single, timeless, endless torment—those things probably wouldn’t be stilled by any amount of physical exertion. Still, he’d rather spar than spend another hour sitting still, holding himself together. His meditation skills were inadequate for what he was asking of them these days. “You’ll win,” he said.

“I’ll pull my punches,” she said, laughing.

They were on a Kree war vessel; of course it had a training room. At the press of a button, fluid seeped up from the grating and solidified into a mat, spongy under Yon-Rogg’s bare feet, musty with a smell familiar from long-ago days of naval training. He looked down the mat to Carol, who was squared up, loose, waiting. Suddenly Yon-Rogg was transported to his home gym in the undercity, this same woman facing him down, as if no time had passed at all. Perhaps Carol was remembering those days too; she looked, for the first time, a little uncertain.

She won easily, that first round. She didn’t use her firepower, or her flight, or whatever other tricks the energy core had handed her that the Supreme Intelligence’s diagnostics hadn’t found. Her technique wasn’t even particularly sharp—why practice hand-to-hand when you could blow any enemy out of the sky with the squeeze of a fist? She was just— _stronger_. Yon-Rogg had lost some conditioning while under the Supreme Intelligence’s correction, but not enough to account for how easily Carol overpowered him. “Is that the energy core, too?” he said from the floor.

Carol looked as surprised as he was. “I guess? I didn’t know I could do that.”

“Well, you always did exceed expectations,” Yon-Rogg said, shoving to his feet. He found his stance, nodded. “Again.”

Carol did try to pull her punches, which is how he finally managed to put her on the mat. Leverage did still do him _some_ good. She didn’t scowl in frustration, like she’d always done before when he’d beaten her. She stared up at him, eyes dark, and then she flipped effortlessly to her feet.

There hadn’t been many in Starforce or out of it that could give Yon-Rogg this much of a fight. He pushed himself harder than he had since Carol had picked him up weeks before, and even as he noticed all the places he was weakened, it was exhilarating to pit his entire self against her, to feel her break his holds like they were nothing. It was the opposite of sleep; it was the best he’d felt since he’d she’d broken him from the Supreme Intelligence’s grip. 

No doubt Carol could go for days, but eventually Yon-Rogg found himself on his back and disinclined to rise again. “Enough,” he said with a gasp. Carol smirked down at him from her perch astride his hips, so very pleased with herself, and him, and the world. Maybe it was that familiar expression or maybe just endorphins that made him say, “You truly are magnificent.”

“Uh, what?”

“You’re all I ever hoped you’d be and more besides.” 

Carol’s face had gone still, which was never a sign of calm with her, only of emotion roiling just below the surface, just out of reach. Yon-Rogg found he hated to see it. “I was wrong,” he said, and at that moment, sprawled on the mat and worn to exhaustion, he ached with how wrong he’d been. “I wanted you to be your best self, but I didn’t know what that was. Truly, I—”

“God, shut up,” Carol said, and kissed him.

For a moment, Yon-Rogg was frozen, shocked out of his weariness and regret and aware only of the heat of Carol’s lips pressed to his, of her weight still resting on him. The next moment he found himself closing his hands over her hips and kissing back, hungry for something he hadn’t even dared think of, starving for it. 

She broke it off after a moment. He opened his eyes expecting to see her drawing away, but instead her gaze were dark with intent. “Carol,” he began, uncertain.

She took a sharp breath. “We could take this to a bunk, if you wanted.”

“ _Yes_ ,” he said.

She rolled off him, pulled him to his feet, and caught his mouth for another kiss. She ran hotter than he remembered from the old days, and she moved with utter self-assurance. She was breathtaking. He murmured something to this effect, possibly nonsense, and she grabbed his hand and tugged him towards the door.

Some time later, sweaty with sparring and sex and just drifting into a doze in Carol’s bunk, Yon-Rogg said, “You were right. I think this will help me sleep.”

Carol grinned without ever opening her eyes. “Told you,” she said.

* * *

Yon-Rogg woke slowly. He didn’t know the hour, but he did know he’d slept a long time, heavily and dreamlessly. He felt more awake than he had in a week, as though he might be able to focus now, without fidgeting—without that creeping certainty that the Supreme Intelligence was just behind him, looking over his shoulder.

He was not alone, though. Carefully he pushed upright to look at Carol, still asleep, tucked in close on the narrow bunk with her hair spread across the pillow. In sleep she looked untroubled.

Yon-Rogg didn’t want to wake her, not yet. He stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes, and listened to the soft inhale and exhale of her breath.

[end]


End file.
